Running rserver without authentication

[riteshkukreja]

I wish to run rserver without authentication. So only one user will be connected to the rserver and no authentication will be made.

I tried running rserver with --auth-none 1

rserver --www-port 9000 --auth-none 1 --auth-validate-users 0

but i am still unable to initialize the client

curl -X POST --form method=client_init http://localhost:9000/rpc/client_init

Response

{"error":{"code":3,"error":null,"message":"Client unauthorized"}}

I want to run rserver using only one user without authentication and without rstudio application. I want to build my own UI that communicate with rserver.
Thanks in advance.

[jmcphers]

If you don't need a UI and you don't want authentication then RStudio Server is probably not what you want to use (it isn't designed for this use case). If you're looking to build a web front end to some R code, you might be better served by something like Plumber:

https://github.com/trestletech/plumber

Hope this helps! If you want to discuss further we recommend the RStudio community forum:

https://community.rstudio.com/

[riteshkukreja]

But running the rserver with --auth-none 1 --auth-validate-users 0 should allow me to execute R commands without authenticating user, right?
Let me trim my use case, I wish to execute R commands and get auto completion without authentication.
Is this possible?

[dinvlad]

@riteshkukreja if that helps still, turns out we also need to set system environmental variable USER=rstudio in order for --auth-none 1 to work (no need to set --auth-validate-users 0 btw).

[grisaitis]

set system environmental variable USER=rstudio in order for --auth-none 1 to work

good advice.

to do this with the systemd service, i needed to modify a few things:

make sure there's an rstudio user on the system:

sudo useradd rstudio
sudo passwd rstudio  # enter some password
sudo mkdir /home/rstudio
sudo chown -R rstudio /home/rstudio/

caution: creating this linux user might mess with RStudio. I have no idea.

add the env variable

sudo systemctl edit rstudio-server

add:

[Service]
Environment="USER=rstudio"

edit the command for the systemd service

# here, add --auth-none 1 on the ExecStart line:
sudo vi /lib/systemd/system/rstudio-server.service
# load these changes
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
# restart rstudio server
sudo systemctl restart rstudio-server
# check logs, if there's an issue
sudo systemctl status rstudio-server